I'm actually glad that you brought this up, because in the old days characters were written out of books while as well as characters written into books...without going for killing off character, in mass, in the most wretched, inane ways possible...while pretending to "love" the very characters that they were destroying.

Captain America is (was) a living legend. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were reformed villains. They all soon proved themselves to be effective Avengers.

When Dave Cockrum, Len Wein, and Chris Claremont first started revitalizing The X-Men, they were not the most popular kids on the block.